Trying to Keep My Cool (Part 2)

When we left our intrepid and mechanically challenged hero, he was stranded in the foothills 60 miles from home with an overheated car and a completely dry radiator. The sun was going down, coyotes were howling in the distance, and he began to inexplicably talk about himself in the third person.

Pulling myself together, I noticed an assortment of small trees growing in pots across the road. Some kind of nursery, out here in the middle of nowhere, I thought. I left my hood up and walked across the road. The gate was chained shut, but there was a good ten inch gap in the middle. I glanced around, then stepped over the chain, sliding through the gap. I walked past the little trees for a few yards until I found the end of a garden hose. I followed the hose, which was, as hoses tend to be, attached to a spigot. Unfortunately the spigot was two feet behind another chain link fence. I’m skinny, but I can’t reach two feet through a chain link fence.

I walked around until I found a five foot length of rebar (you know, that reinforcing bar that they use to strengthen concrete). I poked the rebar through the fence and managed shove the valve open. I went back to the car fetch the empty water bottles. I didn’t want anybody to see me sneaking out of the nursery, so I hid amongst the saplings until the coast was clear, feeling very much the complete idiot. After a couple of trips, my radiator was full, and I’m proud to say that I risked detection to go back and shut off the water so that some poor Mexican wouldn’t get chewed out for leaving the spigot open all night.

I got back on 680, but knowing what awaited me at the 580/680 interchange on a Friday night, I quickly exited and took the surface streets through Pleasanton and Livermore. In Pleasanton, I overheated again and managed to coast into a Raley’s parking lot. I went and had a beer at Round Table, then bought a 24 pack of bottled water, a gallon of antifreeze, a bottle of Dr. Pepper and a copy of The Atlantic. The cashier rang me up as if this was the third time somebody had bought that combination of items that evening. “Have a nice evening,” she said. Like maybe I was planning a party or something.

The next challenge was the Altamont Pass. Another big hill with a name. It’s a name that you may know, in fact. The Altamont is known for two things, besides being a godawful big hill: First, it’s so windy that they’ve lined it with giant windmills for generating power. The wind, of course, heads inland from the Pacific, so if you were driving east at sixty miles an hour and the wind was blowing twenty miles an hour, your car would cool much slower than if the wind were blowing the opposite direction. Theoretically. Second, the Altamont Raceway was the site of the ill-starred Rolling Stones concert in 1969 where four people were killed – one of them knifed, two of them hit by a car, and one drowned. Less famously, the Altamont Pass is the site of thousands of automotive breakdowns a year.

I refilled my radiator before beginning the climb, and amazingly I made it up the Altamont without redlining, then coasted to the bottom. I had to pull over two more times to refill with bottled water, wait for the engine to cool, drink some Dr. Pepper and catch up on what was going on in Afghanistan.

In this manner, I drove the rest of the way to Ripon. I coasted into my driveway with the last of the water hissing out of my radiator at 11:30pm. I had driven 70 miles in six hours. It’s strange how something like that can feel like a significant accomplishment. On top of that, it was nice to have a reminder of why I don’t commute any more. And it was nice to be home.

Happy Independence Day!


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